Infidel Bestsellers

After reviewing The God Delusion yesterday, I checked how it was doing on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Number 8—not bad. Also intriguing: Sam Harris’s latest is number 6. Better than Thomas Friedman’s silly The World is Flat (9), but worse than Bill O’Riley (2—sigh).

One reaction I have, naturally, is envy. I just received the sales report on the first six months of my latest book, Science and Nonbelief, and it seems it’s already sold 250 copies. Whee. (OK, so it’s obnoxiously priced at $65. Still…)

Besides that, though, I don’t know what to make of having two infidel books in the NYT top ten. What is it—more people are curious, sick of religiously-inspired violence, fed up with the Religious Right and willing to check out its opposite—what? Still, even if it’s probably just a flash in the pan, it doesn’t hurt if the wider world occasionally notices that not everyone is a “person of faith.”